Docker Machine still works as described here, but Docker Cloud supercedes Machine for this purpose.

Docker Machine driver plugins are available for many cloud platforms, so you can
use Machine to provision cloud hosts. When you use Docker Machine for
provisioning, you create cloud hosts with Docker Engine installed on them.

Install and run Docker Machine, and create an account with the
cloud provider.

Then you provide account verification, security credentials, and configuration
options for the providers as flags to docker-machine create. The flags are
unique for each cloud-specific driver. For instance, to pass a Digital Ocean
access token you use the --digitalocean-access-token flag. Take a look at the
examples below for Digital Ocean and AWS.

Examples

Digital Ocean

For Digital Ocean, this command creates a Droplet (cloud host) called
“docker-sandbox”.

The docker-machine create command

The docker-machine create command typically requires that you specify, at a
minimum:

--driver - to indicate the provider on which to create the
machine (VirtualBox, DigitalOcean, AWS, and so on)

Account verification and security credentials (for cloud providers),
specific to the cloud service you are using

<machine> - name of the host you want to create

For convenience, docker-machine uses sensible defaults for choosing
settings such as the image that the server is based on, but you override the
defaults using the respective flags, such as --digitalocean-image. This is
useful if, for example, you want to create a cloud server with a lot of memory
and CPUs, rather than the default behavior of creating smaller servers.

Drivers for cloud providers

When you install Docker Machine, you get a set of drivers for various cloud
providers (like Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, or Microsoft Azure) and
local providers (like Oracle VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, or Microsoft Hyper-V).

3rd-party driver plugins

Several Docker Machine driver plugins for use with other cloud platforms are
available from 3rd party contributors. These are use-at-your-own-risk plugins,
not maintained by or formally associated with Docker.

Use Machine to provision Docker Swarm clusters

Swarm mode supercedes Docker Machine provisioning of swarm clusters

In previous releases, Docker Machine was used to provision swarm
clusters, but this is legacy. Swarm mode, built
into Docker Engine, supercedes Machine provisioning of swarm clusters. The
topics below show you how to get started with the new swarm mode.

You can use Docker Machine to create local virtual hosts on which to deploy
and test swarm mode clusters.

Good places to start working with Docker Machine and swarm mode are these
tutorials: